FreeBSD is an open source operating system.
The release of the new version of FreeBSD 12.4 was announced, arriving almost a year after the release of version 12.3. FreeBSD 12.4 is characterized as a bug fix release that, in addition to resolving various issues, also includes a large number of updates for all those users who have not yet upgraded to FreeBSD 13.
FreeBSD 12.4 is the new patch release of the 12.x branch that provides corresponding bug fixes and updates since the previous version release.
Major New Features in FreeBSD 12.4
This new version highlights the addition of DT5 and SDT test calls to the ipfilter packet filter for the dtrace tracing mechanism, as well as the ability to dump a copy of ippool in the ippool.conf format. Modifying ipfilter rules, address translation tables, and ippools from jail environments that do not use the VNET virtual network stack is prohibited.
Another notable change in this new version of FreeBSD 12.4 is improved hardware support , in addition to bug fixes in the aesni, aw_spi, igc, ixl, mpr, ocs_fc, snd_uaudio, and usb drivers . The ena driver has been updated to version 2.6.1 to support the second generation of ENAv2 (Elastic Network Adapter) network adapters used in the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure to manage communication between EC2 nodes.
Support for Intel CPUs based on the Comet Lake, Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, and Rocket Lake microarchitectures has been added to the hwpmc (Hardware Performance Monitoring Counter) framework.
In the sh command interpreter , the profile loading logic has changed, since now first, all files with the extension ".sh" are loaded from the /etc/profile.d directory, then the /usr/local/etc/profile file is loaded , after which files with the extension ".sh" are loaded from the /usr/local/etc/profile.d/ directory.
In addition, we can also find that the cp utility implements protection against infinite recursion when using the "-R" indicator, ensures the correct processing of the "-H", "-L" and "-P" indicators (for example, when specifying "-H" or "-P", the symbolic links that expand), the "-P" indicator is allowed without the "-R" indicator.
Furthermore, it is mentioned that in this version the telnetd server process was decommissioned, as its codebase is no longer maintained and has quality issues. In the FreeBSD 14 branch, the telnetd code will be removed from the system. Support for Telnet clients remains unchanged.
Other notable changes in this new version include:
- The if_epair driver, which is used to create virtual Ethernet interfaces, provides the ability to parallelize traffic processing using multiple CPU cores.
- Improved performance of the nfsd, elfctl, usbconfig, fsck_ufs, and growfs utilities.
- The tcpdump utility provides the ability to set the number of rules that are displayed in the pflog header.
- With DragonFly BSD, the DragonFly Mail Agent (dma) message delivery agent code is synchronized, ensuring message reception and delivery from local mail clients (processing of network SMTP requests over the port is not supported). 25).
- The pf packet filter fixed memory leaks and improved state synchronization by redirecting traffic when using pfsync.
- Updated versions of third-party applications included in the base system: LLVM 13, unbound 1.16.3, OpenSSL 1.1.1q, OpenSSH 9.1p1, file 5.43, libarchive 3.6.0, sqlite 3.39.3, expat 2.4.9, hostapd/ wpa_supplicant 2.10.
Download and Get FreeBSD 12.4
For those interested in being able to obtain this new version, they should know that the installation images are available for amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, sparc64 and armv6, armv7 and aarch64 architectures.
Additionally, images are provided for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and Amazon EC2 cloud environments. FreeBSD 12.4 will be the last update to the 12.x branch, which will continue to be maintained until December 31, 2023. The FreeBSD 13.2 update will be prepared in the spring, and the release of FreeBSD 14.0 is scheduled for July 2023.